Title: If Dreams Were Wishes and Wishes Were StarsAuthor: OmnicatSpoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge: Tensai Okamura & co’s Darker than Black: the Black Contractor anime, with a reference to Amber’s Contractor refuge community from the Darker than Black: Origins OVAs and a great big fuck you to everything else in those and the Darker than Black: Gemini of the Meteor anime.Warnings: None.Characters & Relationships: Hei x Amber & Pai & Yin & MisakiSummary: Hei’s world would look something like this.Author’s Note: Okay, screw it, I’ve been wanting fix-it fic for ten years. I’m just gonna write one, no matter how basic. Maybe I’ll write ten. Maybe I’ll keep writing fix-its until I’m no longer a squishy-soft weakling in the face of not happy enough endings for all my favorites, or I’ve used up every word in existence, or I die of old age. RAWR.Enjoy!

If Dreams Were Wishes and Wishes Were Stars

Hei emerges from the deepest depths of the Gate with Yin by the hand and that unsettling awareness of the place lodged under his skin like a stone in his shoe.

"Do you feel that?" he asks hours later, when it still hasn’t faded.

"Yes," Yin says.

Hei wants to claw at himself. He wants to draw on his power and let it pour out until there’s nothing left, until he’s empty of it, of this maddening, inexplicable pressure. It terrifies him. Is this what happened when they first discovered the Meteor Fragment, back in South America? He hadn’t been able to understand back then, but if this was what those Contractors were experiencing, he gets it now. A massacre with no point or purpose seems like the least unlikely outcome.

"I feel so free," Yin says in a voice stronger than he’s ever heard from her, and all Hei can do is stare at her spectre as it dances on the river like a real girl out at play. "I feel so alive."

Stare, and buckle down on whatever it is that’s filled up his insides with starfire.

They make quick, furtive stops by the tobacco shop and the apartment. Stupid, stupider, stupidest, but even the two of them have things they don’t want to leave behind, and people they want to say goodbye to.

"Wait!" he hears a voice call as he leaves the apartment for the last time, Amber’s feather charm tucked in his pocket. And he’d like to say goodbye to Kirihara too – to thank her for setting aside her suspicions just to be his friend for a couple nights, and hope she’ll look the other way one more time – but as long as he has Yin to take care of, he can’t take that chance.

I’m sorry, he tells her silently, and disappears.

He doesn’t sleep for almost three days. A good thing, all considered; the Syndicate doesn’t sleep either. But his mind and body can’t keep up with what his Contract wants forever, so eventually he –

Well, he thinks he manages to raid a Syndicate safehouse and instruct Yin on how to plunge him back into fighting form with just the jab of a needle. He must’ve gotten the sedatives that finally knocked him out from somewhere. But maybe the details he remembers later were just waking dreams.

Maybe he only dreams the voices calling for him, the figures straining toward him through blinding solar winds –

He comes to naturally, Yin watching over him with only a cup of tea in her hands. There’s breakfast on the table that he never instructed her to make. Her spectre leans her elbows on the windowsill from a bowl of water, her head following a movement somewhere on the streets below.

Yin is thriving.

Hei wishes he had room left to be happy for her, or intrigued by her, or worried about her. But it’s all he can do to pull himself back from the edge of melting down when the Syndicate finds them again, and again and again and again, to make the surge of electricity stop once it starts. He can’t shake the fear that if he gives in to that urge to spill every wave and particle of the power inside him, it’ll cost him something irreplaceable.

"You’ll be alright," Yin tells him. "I am."

He tries to believe her.

They leave Tokyo further and further behind; leave Umitsuki Apartments, the friendly cop, the excitable anime girl, the cat that was once a friend, the streets and people that had started to feel almost like home.

Hei sleeps little and with difficulty, because there is an inferno swirling in his veins and a torrent of memories coming alive in his dreams.

Brother, they whisper to him, and Darling.

They keep moving, further from the city and closer to supernova, and the Gate moves with them.

Until one morning, rather than the fresh new disaster he’s been poised for, he wakes from a dream of familiar hands finally finding his own, and a star quietly winking out. He wakes warm and comfortable and rested. He wakes blessedly, inconceivably calm.

It’s all he can feel, at first: the sheer peace of the moment. The sense of completion, of a Contract fulfilled for the first time in weeks.

But his stomach is growling, and his bed is too crowded. Arms around his waist, bodies pressed close, long hair tickling his face – the yelps register before his own actions do. He vaults away, sheets tangling but knife in hand. Conscious thought doesn’t enter into it until he rolls to his feet at the end of the bed and takes in the scene.

His eyes go wide, and wider still.

Laughing, Amber brushes her long, pale hair from her face. "I told you he’d do that."

"Worth it," Pai says.

They’re a sleep-soft vision, mussed and rosy-cheeked. Pai sits up, rubbing her eyes, while Amber stretches like a cat, all the curves of adulthood back on her frame. They’re both wearing his shirts and tangled in his sheets, piles of their South American gear abandoned on a chair by the window, and – and –

They’re real. Hei can feel it in his bones, in that place deeper still where the Meteor Fragment had been smoldering all this time.

"Pai," he croaks.

"Brother."

She opens her arms to him, smiling, and he can’t fall into them fast enough. She’s real. He buries his face in her hair and breathes in her scent, and she’s real, she’s real, she’s real. She’s a warm and solid weight in his arms, and her grip is firm, and she’s not dead inside the way he’d stared himself so blind on trying to accept that he missed all the signs to the contrary in the end, and she’ll stay, he can tell, his little sister is back and here to stay.

Without loosening his grip on Pai, Hei looks over his shoulder at Amber. "And you..."

It’s a question he doesn’t know how to ask.

"I guess the Meteor Fragment had one last surprise left for me as well. It used up all of my power in the process, but look what it bought us," Amber says. Her smile is like the sun, and the love in her eyes is just as he remembers it from those dark days when he wouldn’t let himself believe any of it.

Amber is at his unprotected back again, just as Pai is once more tucked beneath his chin. Everything he thought he’d lost forever, swallowed by the Gates, right back within arm’s reach.

He trusts Amber where she is, and for the first time in a long time he remembers that despite everything, he somehow always has. But eyes boring into his back was all he’d ever let her be, and enough of that. It was no place for her. Enough now.

Letting go of Pai with one arm, he reaches for Amber, cups the back of her head, and draws her in for a long, long overdue kiss.

"Should you be doing that with one arm around me?" Pai asks dryly, just as there’s a knock on the door. She perks up. "Ah, Yin."

Pai slips from his grasp to open the door of their inconspicuously mid-range hotel room. Hei breaks away from Amber, caution not a habit he intends to break now that he has so much more to lose again, but it really is just Yin.

"Breakfast," she says, holding up one arm’s worth of plastic grocery bags. And then the other: "Clothes. Good morning, Hei." Her voice, as ever, is as bland as if she were commenting on the weather. But after a moment of struggle, one corner of her mouth turns up. "Told you. Everything is alright."

Hei looks around the room – at every last piece of the miracle the Meteor Fragment has let him dream up – and for the first time since he can’t remember when, he laughs so hard he couldn’t make himself stop if he tried.

She’d told him, alright.

Amber winds her arms around his waist and hooks her chin around his shaking shoulder. "Let’s run away together. Just the four of us. I have a place – a secret place where it doesn’t matter what we are. We’ll be safe, and together, and we’ll live peacefully for as long as we want it."

"Your Garden of Eden?" Pai asks. "You managed it?"

Amber nods.

"I’d like that. Let’s go, brother," Pai says, and Yin nods too.

So they go.

And back in Tokyo, Misaki Kirihara wakes that day to the strangest Astronomics report she’s ever gotten, even on BK-201, and a call to a suspected crime scene that turns out not to be a crime scene after all.

The Gate works in mysterious ways.

Any other day, that might have worried her. But today, as she strides through the puddles left in the streets by an exploded fire hydrant and a lens-like object skids out from under her shoe, a voice as soft and clear as water whispers take it in her ear; keep it hidden. One day, this will be needed again, and we’ll come back for it.

One day, this will bring you the answers you’re looking for.

So she slips the Meteor Fragment into her pocket for safe keeping. But just from this, she’s already gotten the most important answer of all.